A friend of mine is a Doctor. This is what he suggests to anyone who is truly interested in stopping.

1. Smoke as much as you need to
2. Start rolling your own, unfiltered.
3. Put the pack somewhere inconvenient, like car trunk or in a hard to reach box in the garage
4. Only every smoke outside, under an open sky. No cars, no houses, no awnings, no umbrellas, etc. No matter the weather.

He says this makes it accessible but inconvenient and not as enjoyable. Eventually the inconvenience will start to outweigh the need until you end up quitting. He says he has like a 80-90% success rate with those who actually follow through

My grandfather quit smoking by switching the habit to lollipops. He always used to say it was a good replacement for the oral fixation and fidgeting

I suggested to a friend years ago that he keep all of hit used butts in a jar beside his bed. He came up with this idea that he should add some water to the jar.

The reminder every time he got up or went to bed that the black goop shit was the same stuff he was putting into his lungs every day eventually got him to stop. He couldn’t even look at the jar anymore — and certainly didn’t want to add to it. That thing was nasty.

It’s not just a habit, it’s a chemical dependence. If you really want to quit, I suggest vaping. It was invented to be a smoking cessation tool as you can easily taper off the amount of nicotine, while still performing “the ritual”.

Once the chemical dependency is gone, then you can go for a walk or something to keep yourself busy, but until then you’ve got an addiction to deal with.

Source: I used vaping to quit a 10-year, pack/day habit.

Mindfulness. Don’t resist the urges, but every time you smoke, practice being present - literally just try to keep your attention on what you are doing. Don’t judge yourself for doing it, just notice. If you are able to do this, it will help with much more than just quitting smoking.

The thing that worked for me, which I had literally never heard anywhere for some reason, is to quit drinking for about six months when you quit smoking.

At least for me, all my relapses happened when I was at a bar or a party having drinks.

Way I quite. First I swapped to vaping. It was an easy switch. It tasted better smelled better and gave me the same rush. Though it did take 2 times for me to guilt switch. After that lowered the nicotine level slowly. Got down to 0. I never said I couldn’t have one. I just played the game of how long I could go without. Started off delaying a few minutes. Then progressed to 15 minutes the half hour. Then I’d skip a break at work. At some point I crave one then tell myself later and if go hours without one. Changed to days. I don’t remember my last one. Also jolly rancher hard Candy or the like helped with cravings or delaying the need to go have a smoke. Could skip the vaping but I found it so much better that smoking.

Quit specific cigarettes. One at a time.

No more “after meal” cigarettes. Ooh, that’s rough man.

Okay, now, no more “after work” cigarette.

No more “responding to frustration” cigarette.

No more coffee cigarette.

No more drunk cigarette.

You’re probably more addicted to smoking in the scenes/scenarios/circumstances you find yourself in the most frequently than you are to smoking cigarettes. So quit one at a time rather than “smoking” all at once.

There is a lot of solid research behind this method. If you’re a mid 30s American, you might remember the ad from the mid 2000s where the woman carjacks someone so that she can smoke. Narrator comes on “you don’t drive every time you smoke… …but you smoke every time you drive 🤔”

That campaign, iirc, was called “think of a new way to quit”

This is going to be really atypical: smoke cigars.

I never really smoked cigarettes so I never had an addiction with them. But I do like cigars. I smoke them occasionally, as do most people with few exceptions. I’ve heard, though, from some former cigarette smokers that switching to cigars helped them mostly painlessly stop their addiction to constantly smoking cigarettes by instead just having an occasional, even maybe weekly, cigar. Cigars may be more intense but also don’t have all the chemicals and crap that some cigarettes have, and cigars even intentionally remove some of the chemicals that cigarettes may add, like ammonia.

Had a good doctor who told me you can’t “try to quit”. You can’t “cut back”. You can’t quit for other people or before you are ready. But once you are… he said every successful quitter he helped, quit cold turkey. You have to stop 100% or you won’t stop. He offered meds to help with the emotional and physical side effects. I declined.

I was a smoker for 20+ years, many of those I was well over a pack a day and I worked in a smoking bar for over a decade. It’s probably too late for me is what I thought, BUT I DID IT.

Quit 2 and a half years ago. It hasn’t gotten any easier yet. I still want to smoke daily. But I haven’t had a single puff. I still hang out with friends that smoke but I did change my normal environment. (Quit while I was moving to make breaking associated habits easier.)

The things I found most helpful when the craving kicks in… Exercise was the best. HARD physical labor. Also sleeping and eating. Luckily I was in decent shape already so eating a bit more often wasn’t a huge deal. The tons of extra exercise just burned it off or helped build up some muscle mass I didn’t know was possible.

For me, I started thinking about the cost and the smell every time I had one. I quit cold turkey a few weeks later and felt grossed out every time I had one after that. I quit in 2009 and haven’t had a cigarette since 2010.

Cigarettes smell really disgusting to me now.

Smoker for 35 years… This might not help you directly, but I went to Australia for 3 months where cigarettes are USD$50 per pack. At that price I’m not buying. Went cold turkey and it’s been 6 months and still not purchased a pack, even though I’m now in another country where a pack is just USD$2.

Sunflower seeds helped me. Watch the sodium intake.

Not sure if it’s atypical, but you could try reading “Alan Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking” and “The Freedom Model of Addictions”. The basic premise of the books is, that if you really want to quit, you will quit easily, and that in order to really want to quit you need to reevaluate the reward value of your habit instead of focusing on the negatives. You smoke because you find it pleasurable. The books guide you to better understand what part of your habit you find pleasurable exactly. Is it the nicotine rush? Or maybe the you like the social aspect of it? After finding out what exactly you find pleasurable about your habit, the books will give you pointers on how to reevaluate if the pleasure you derive from it is really all that great compared to other activities or whether it really solves the problem that you set out to solve with your habit.

There is no way you could reproduce this now, but when I quit smoking, I worked in a place where everyone smoked, so I got it second-hand for quite a while after that.